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Washington, D.C—The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) today called on the House to pass Senate-approved legislation—S. 494—that would strengthen protections for federal whistleblowers who disclose evidence of waste, fraud or abuse discovered in the ordinary course of their work.

In testimony before the House Government Reform Committee, NTEU said S. 494 would close loopholes in protection generated by a May 30 Supreme Court decision, Garcetti v. Ceballos, holding that public employees have no First Amendment protections when they speak in furtherance of their duties.

NTEU has a long tradition of fighting to protect the free speech rights of government employees, both in the courts and through the legislative process. The union has sought for many years to advance this cause, both to protect the rights of employees to speak out and to further the broader public interest in hearing what employees have to say.

At present, the union said, the federal Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) “is notoriously inadequate” to protect those who come forward with information important to the public. In fact, NTEU said, the WPA, as interpreted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit—the court that currently has exclusive jurisdiction to decide WPA cases—“contains the same gaping holes that the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Garcetti has torn out of the First Amendment.”

The Garcetti case opens up the possibility of serious repercussions for public employees whose conscientious pursuit of their duties leads them to make disclosures of wrongdoing or to express unpopular views, when such views are expressed internally, NTEU said in its testimony.

Oddly, “the perverse result” of that case could be to encourage employees to go public with their concerns in order to secure the protections of the First Amendment, rather than pursuing their concerns internally, where they lack both constitutional protection (thanks to Garcetti) and WPA protection (thanks to the Federal Circuit).

In addition to pressing for House approval of S. 494, the Federal Employee Protection of Disclosure Act, NTEU stressed the importance of curbing agency tendencies toward unnecessary secrecy and protecting employees in internal policy disagreements.

On the latter issue, the union testimony noted that “some preliminary steps” have been taken at such NTEU-represented agencies as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Food and Drug Administration to protect employees with strongly-held professional disagreements.

“These agencies have agreed to give their employees the right to preserve in the record their professional disagreements of opinion,” the testimony said, adding that “NTEU has supplemented these protections with contractually-negotiated rights, in order to address employees’ feelings of vulnerability when they express their professional opinions.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments.